The Florida Board of Education's refusal to apply even minimal housekeeping principles to its prize voucher experiment does not deserve a passing grade.
Published December 14, 2003
To appreciate the extent to which Florida's Department of Education has failed to enforce school voucher laws, one need only flip through the work of the auditors that chief financial officer Tom Gallagher deployed to take a look.
Their checklists are all X's.
DOE has rules in place to govern vouchers: NO.
DOE has clear audit standards for groups getting tax money: NO.
DOE has a "program management" plan to make sure vouchers comply with state law: NO.
DOE has written procedures for legal compliance: NO.
DOE checks to make sure private schools meet requirements of law: NO.
DOE checks to make sure students meet eligibility criteria and are actually attending school: NO.
DOE makes sure voucher checks are not fraudulently cashed: NO.
DOE has agreements with private organizations empowered to spend millions on vouchers: NO.
What Gallagher's audit reveals goes well beyond lax enforcement. It shows an abdication of responsibility that is breathtaking in its sweep. In four quick years, Florida has created three different voucher programs that now serve 24,000 students at a cost this year of roughly $135-million. Yet DOE, until just two months ago, couldn't even determine which students received the money and whether some of them were getting more than one check (they were). Is anyone minding the voucher store?
State education commissioner Jim Horne reacted to the audit through a written statement, declaring that "more accountability is vital." But he is more than a little late to that party. For the past two years, Horne has engaged in a systematic denial of the problems in the voucher programs. His agency has attacked the critics, refusing to answer questions or even to supply public records. Horne demoted a former choice administrator who had raised many of the same questions now being asked by Gallagher, and he is currently working on his seventh choice administrator in three years.
Worse, Horne has, on more than one occasion, provided false assurances about the agency's progress. Gallagher's auditors ran into that problem themselves and dutifully took note in their report, pointedly, that: "Contrary to information provided by DOE, prior to October 2003, no system existed for tracking funding by student." Translation: DOE lied.
In most business environments, such behavior would not be tolerated. But neither the Board of Education nor Gov. Jeb Bush has shown any inclination to punish Horne for his pattern of reckless stewardship over the governor's prized voucher program. One reason might be that the board itself continues to send the signal that accountability applies only to public schools. In a debate last month about whether voucher students should be subject to the same rigorous testing standards the board has insisted be applied to public school students, board member T. Willard Fair was quick to disagree.
"I hope we don't create a set of rules that make it more difficult" for private schools and charter schools to be innovative, Fair argued. "I think that's where we're going. Accountability might be a disguise for adaptability, making everyone adapt."
Accountability, as previously espoused by Horne and Bush, has meant that every tax dollar for public education is measured by whether it helps produce a year's worth of learning in a year's time. In the arena of vouchers, now $135-million and growing, no one at DOE seems to care.
